1. Field of the Invention
The invention consists of a system for carrying out drilling/riveting in the assembly of aeronautical pieces in automatic facilities, having the aim of permitting the drilling/riveting to be modified in a simple manner, according to the needs required by the pieces for each application.
It is also an object of the invention to enable the machining parameters to be modified.
It is a further object of the invention to permit the configuration of the pieces to be modified so that they can be adapted to the different changes required in each application of the pieces.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the aeronautical sector, there exist automatic facilities intended for carrying out the drilling/riveting tool process of the pieces used in assemblies, for which a robot is used, governed by a numerical control device for carrying out the drilling/riveting in the assembly chain of the different pieces of an aircraft.
Each of these automatic facilities performs a job that is determined by the actual design of the piece. The job to be carried out is defined in the numerical control device, which contains the necessary information for carrying it out and governing the functioning of the robot in such manner that the automatic assembly of the piece is performed. This information is contained in a program saved in the numerical control device and contains thousands of drilling/riveting operations to be performed on the piece in order to effect its automatic assembly.
Due to the characteristics of the aeronautical assembly process, the configuration of the pieces to be drilled/riveted frequently varies from one aircraft to another, as do the production requirements for their assembly and the drilling/riveting parameters. This implies the need to modify the information contained in the numerical control device in order to adapt it to these changes in each aircraft, at all times maintaining the original information as the basis for implementing these modifications in the aircraft that are necessary. In turn, it is occasionally necessary to make changes to the programmed information that has previously been modified.
In this regard, the existence can be stated of two different processes permitting the modification of the information contained in the program of the numerical control device to be modified.
The first of these methods uses the same programming methodology that is followed for obtaining the original program, which is very costly and requires a high degree of specialization. In this case, it is required to load the original program in a CAD/CAM (Computed assisted design/Computer assisted manufacture) programming system and then the modifications required in the program are input, enabling/disabling drillings, changes in the machining parameters, such as the drilling speed, advance speed, etc., and introducing the new needs required in the manufacturing process, in order to then carry out the conversion of the program modified with the CAD/CAM system to the machine language corresponding to the automatic facility, and finally load the program in machine language into the numerical control device.
This process involves a high cost, apart from the considerable difficulty it entails given that it requires the writing of a new program.
The second process that can conventionally be used for effecting these modifications consists of the manual modification of the program by means of using a text editor, which involves a high risk for the pieces to drill/rivet, owing to the high percentage of human error that can exist in this manual execution.